Reliability, validity (bit) ethics concerns (when interviewing)

Ethics: confidentiality, consent well-informed about what participation

entails, and reassured that declining will not affect any services they
receive. While written consent may in some situations frighten the
individuals you are talking to, you should at the very least obtain verbal
consent.
Reliability and validity does not apply the same in quantitative than in
qualitative methods. While reliability means replicability, in qualitative
methods may be seen as precision (Winter, 2000), credibility, and
transferability (Hoepf, 1997)(Golafshani, 2003, p.600)
Reliability (taken from Martin Lindhart):
One-to-one interviews with standardised questions appeared to have the
highest reliability.
In an interview we could be assessing knowledge, skills, abilities,
personality, motivation
Validity:
is about showing that conclusions are based on proper research and are not
just guesswork.
Reproducible: that is, someone else could use the same topic guide to
generate similar information;
Systematic: to ensure that we are not just picking interviewees or data that
support our pre-existing ideas about the answers;
Credible: the questions we ask, for instance, and the ways in which we ask
them should be reasonable ones for generating valid (or truthful) accounts
of phenomena.
Transparent: methods should be written up so that readers can see exactly
how the data were collected and analysed.
(martin)

Congruence between empirical world and theoretical concepts.

Are the concepts we use to describe the world we study proper and
suitable?

Measure reliability and

Strategies can be implemented to ensure criteria of trustworthiness:
According to(Noble & Smith, 2015) include:
1. Accounting for personal biases which may have influenced findings
2. Acknowledging biases in sampling and ongoing critical reflection of
methods to ensure sufficient depth and relevance of data collection
and analysis

3. Meticulous record keeping, demonstrating a clear decision trail and

ensuring interpretations of data are consistent and transparent
4. Establishing a comparison case/seeking out similarities and
differences across accounts to ensure different perspectives are
represented
5. Including rich and thick verbatim descriptions of participants
accounts to support findings
6. Demonstrating clarity in terms of thought processes during data
analysis and subsequent interpretations3
7. Engaging with other researchers to reduce research bias
8. Respondent validation: includes inviting participants to comment on
the interview transcript and whether the final themes and concepts
created adequately reflect the phenomena being investigated
9. Data triangulation,whereby different methods and perspectives help
produce a more comprehensive set of findings.
Guba and Lincoln proposed1 four criteria for judging the soundness of
qualitative research and explicitly offered these as an alternative to more
traditional quantitatively-oriented criteria. They felt that their four criteria
better reflected the underlying assumptions involved in much qualitative
research. Their proposed criteria and the "analogous" quantitative criteria
are listed in the table.
Traditional Criteria for

Alternative Criteria for

Judging Quantitative

Judging Qualitative

Research

Research

internal validity

credibility

external validity

transferability

reliability

dependability

objectivity

confirmability

10.Credibility

1 Taken from http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/qualval.php

The credibility criteria involves establishing that the results of

qualitative research are credible or believable from the perspective of
the participant in the research. Since from this perspective, the
purpose of qualitative research is to describe or understand the
phenomena of interest from the participant's eyes, the participants
are the only ones who can legitimately judge the credibility of the
results.
11.Transferability
Transferability refers to the degree to which the results of qualitative
research can be generalized or transferred to other contexts or
settings. From a qualitative perspective transferability is primarily the
responsibility of the one doing the generalizing. The qualitative
researcher can enhance transferability by doing a thorough job of
describing the research context and the assumptions that were
central to the research. The person who wishes to "transfer" the
results to a different context is then responsible for making the
judgment of how sensible the transfer is.
12.Dependability
The

traditional

quantitative

view

of reliability is

based

on

the

assumption of replicability or repeatability. Essentially it is concerned

with whether we would obtain the same results if we could observe
the same thing twice. But we can't actually measure the same thing
twice -- by definition if we are measuring twice, we are measuring two
different

things.

In

order

to

estimate

reliability,

quantitative

researchers construct various hypothetical notions to try to get

around this fact.
13.The idea of dependability, on the other hand, emphasizes the need
for the researcher to account for the ever-changing context within
which research occurs. The research is responsible for describing the
changes that occur in the setting and how these changes affected the
way the research approached the study.
14.Confirmability
Qualitative research tends to assume that each researcher brings a
unique perspective to the study. Confirmability refers to the degree to
which the results could be confirmed or corroborated by others. There

are a number of strategies for enhancing confirmability. The

researcher can document the procedures for checking and rechecking
the data throughout the study. Another researcher can take a "devil's
advocate" role with respect to the results, and this process can be
documented. The researcher can actively search for and describe
and negative instances that contradict prior observations. And, after
he study, one can conduct a data audit that examines the data
collection and analysis procedures and makes judgements about the
potential for bias or distortion.
But qualitative researchers do have a point about the irrelevance of
traditional quantitative criteria. How could we judge the external
validity of a qualitative study that does not use formalized sampling
methods? And, how can we judge the reliability of qualitative data
when there is no mechanism for estimating the true score? No one
has adequately explained how the operational procedures used to
assess validity and reliability in quantitative research can be
translated into legitimate corresponding operations for qualitative
research.